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The Land of Tereden

Hi! After introducing myself, I had to come here to show off my map of the Land of Tereden, which was made for my husband's fantasy novel series. Originally hand-drawn, the final line art was done in Photoshop, as was the rest of the map.

If anyone has any constructive critiques, I'd love to hear them -- I'm really interested in improving in this field!

I love the texture of the map - it almost seems to glow. I also love the individual mountain symbols. The font choice, size, placement and orientation (except for Amber Valley - not sure why it's at an angle) really works for me as well. I like your convention of naming cities and towns in all caps and terrain features in upper and lowercase.

A scale bar might be useful (although if this is accompanying a book, distance information might become apparent from reading the book itself)

Do the mountains, forests and rivers symbols need an explanation in the legend? In fact the only symbol which I don't understand (maybe they're fields or steppes) are the large cross hatches above the text for the Southvale Expanse. The symbols in the Westwood Wastelands and Amber Valley also don't appear in the legend. I'd suggest either putting all or none of the symbols in the key.

We've recently been having a chat about rivers on this thread and this thread . Worth having a read but the potted version is that rivers don't (or very rarely) fork, instead they merge. This needs to balanced against the fact that it's a fantasy map and weird things happen in fantasy worlds. That led onto a wider discussion on the extent to which fantasy terrain should follow natural laws. Nonetheless the rivers in the map do some extremely funky things - there's one (Moroth river) which cuts across the entire continent and has a triple fork in the middle.

Anyway all these are tiny points on what is a lovely, visually pleasing map. Great work!

This map is wonderful. I will echo the critiques listed above re: the legend, the shape of the island, etc.

As for Photoshop use, I think this is very well done except it contains no texture. It appears to be a white map under a yellow light, and I think this is because the paper has no depth, irregularities, or other authentic features. Have you ever thought of running a verrrry slight texturizer filter on it (ex: even sandstone), or perhaps of overlaying a scanned in piece of thick paper or cloth? (Or, if you want to get really crazy, you could use a displacement map, too, but that's perhaps over the top.)

My only gripe is (as ravs pointed out) the rivers. I am a bit river anal though, so take anything I rant about rivers with grain of salt. Your worst offense with rivers is that they cut clean across the island! Where does the water come from and which way does it flow? They also cut clean through mountain ranges in two cases.

Gorgeous! I really like the style of this map. I didn't notice the rivers, but I did wonder what those grid-like shapes were. The only new thing I have to add is that the label for the Crimson Mountains is obscured by the mountains themselves. All the other labels are placed on open land, limiting the interference of other lines.